Letters: Fayetteville's slogan

Copyright 2013: Houston Chronicle

Updated 6:45 pm, Friday, February 22, 2013

Fayetteville

Regarding "Fayetteville's slogan is kind of a secret" (Page A1, Sunday), Joe Holley's column's reference to the guys meeting for coffee and not speaking about politics and religion reminded me of the early 1960s.

Back then the city of Fayetteville was about 750 strong and double that number of dairy and cotton farming families still lived on and earned their living from their farms.

The town's public school was about to be closed by the state because the state thought it too small.

Protestant German families met with Catholic Czech families and found a solution that helped save the school and the town.

Public school buses would transport Catholic school kids to and from public school with a slight detour every morning.

That detour was to drop off the Catholic kids for 30 minutes of religion class, ending with the Catholic school buses transporting the Catholic kids to the public school across town in the company of their religion teachers, the Sisters of Divine Providence from San Antonio's Our Lady of the Lake College.

The sisters were fully garbed in multiple layers of long-sleeved and shoe-length black clothing and a white rimmed bonnet with a huge crucifix displayed around their necks, so that they could teach secular studies in the public school and receive a pay check for doing so from the state of Texas.

Until that last generation of teaching nuns got too old, that K-12 school of about 200 kids were taught for years by some of the finest teachers with master's and doctorate degrees that would make the poshest Houston private schools green with envy.

If only our Congress could work together to do better like those good hardworking German and Czech families who understood that their children's future was all that mattered!